SCIENTISTS DIFFER.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 18281, 23 December 1922, Page 7

SCIENTISTS DIFFER.

ANCIENT TOOTH FOUND.

PREHISTORIC MAN OR REAR?

At a scientific meeting of the Zoological Society in London, Professor Elliot Smith exhibited photographs and a cast, recently received from America, of what is now a famous fossil tooth. As Professor Elliot Smith stated last May, the specimen was found by Mr. Harold J. Cook in beds of Pliocene age in Nebraska, where other remains of extinct mammals, some apparently with Asiatic affinities, have been discovered. After taking the opinion of various American experts, Professor H. F. Osborn, the leading paleontologist of America, identified it as a second upper molar of a creature certainly belonging to the group of Primates, but neither an orang, gorilla, chimpanzee, nor any known race of extinct man or man-like ape. If this identification be accepted, then, for the time being, America can lay claim to have been the home of the oldest ape-like man, or man-like ape, yet discovered. Dr. Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of geology at the British Museum of Natural History, however, has already stated his doubts' of the interpretation, holding that the tooth showed a close resemblance with the last lower molar of extinct primitive bears belonging to the genus Hyaenarctos, creatures of which fossil remains, although unfortunately not including a last lower molar, had" already been discovered in American Pliocene beds.

Professor Elliot Smith fully admitted the unexpectedness of finding a, large primate in the lower pliocene of America representing a type of the human race older than Pithecanthropus, the fossil man of Java. But on going through the characters of the tooth one by one, aid, abovo all, on examining photographs tiken by X-rays, which showed the configuration of the pulp cavity, he was disposed to agree that it made known to us the existence of a primate, in some respect.* like the chimpanzee, but definitely h-iman rather than ape-like. Dr. Smith Woodward adhered to his opinion that it was more likely to belong to the known genera of extinct bears than to an unknown primate in a continent which had not yet yielded any remains of such creatures. He might have been wrong in thinking it a molar from the lower jaw, but he claimed that it was much more like the upper molar of a carnivore than of a primate.